Toxicology is the scientific study of chemicals and their effects on living organisms. There are many factors that toxicologists need to take into account when studying and categorizing the toxicity of chemicals such as dosage (the most important), routes of exposure, age, gender, and specific individual characteristics. Before I tell you more, it's important to know what to do if you ever encounter a hazardous chemical. If you visit the American Association of Poison Control Centers
website, you will find more information about the nation's free primary source of poison information and their efforts to prevent and treat exposures. If you ever need help or information about toxins, please call the AAPCC any time for your local poison control center at 1-800-222-1222. They also have a link toward the bottom of their website for the National Poison Data System's
current annual report. There you will find a comprehensive report of the previous year's call data. Within it, they have statistics on everything you can think of regarding poison: who got what, how, where, why, etc. Did you know that almost half (47.7%) of all human exposures to substances were children less than 6 years old? Even more frightening, more than one-third (35.6%) of all human exposures were children less than the age of 3. More often than none, these children were males. This could have been my nephew (seen below). This picture was taken when he was about 4 years old (6 years ago), shortly after he was diagnosed with Asperger's. To my knowledge, he has never been exposed to any toxic chemicals, but doctors still don't know what caused his disorder.
The current annual report also talks briefly about the statistical reasons for these exposures. For the most part (79.4% of the time), the exposures were unintentional. As I said earlier, the most important characteristics of a chemical is it's dosage. There were over a quarter of a million therapeutic errors in 2014, including double-dosing (the largest at 29.2%), the wrong medication taken or given, other incorrect dose, doses taken/given too close together, and exposure to someone else's medication.
The last section on the report I will talk about is the routes of exposure. By a long run (83.7%), ingestion was the most frequent route of exposure. I'm sure not everyone knows what chemicals they take in daily. I didn't know that the microwavable mashed potatoes I eat as a snack sometimes had so many ingredients.
Who knows what calcium stearoyl lactylate is? If it's in the food we eat, it must be good, right? The next most common route of exposure in 2014 was through the skin at 7%, followed by inhalation at 6.1%, and through the eyes at 4.3%. If we're talking about exposure-related deaths, ingestion again wins at 81.4% of all cases.
